Love Without End Amen

The stone city below us through the windows blue at night, my white shoulders, my white face transposed across it by the glass like somebody dead; like bloody, bloody Mary in the mirror at midnight: patron saint of my scarlet life.

Behind me from the bed he reaches for me. I like the dark hair on his forearms, the white hair on his chest. The bones in his feet and his dimples. His hands, though, are too soft and floury--long palmed like a monkey, repulsive. Earlier, dancing, his hands around my shoulders, my belly, my neck like a constrictor. In my hair, and breathing me, this older man, saying the things everybody says.

My head is a bell.

Kiss me harder, I say. My hand behind his head I pull his hair. He can kiss harder but it isn't enough--I want to feel his bones, I want it to hurt, I want his skin to be rough, for him to hold me like a man. But he can't and it isn't. There is a solution. I always find the solution.

The bartender smiles, he pours like an angel.

You should be back here with me, he says. You look lonesome.

You don't look much better.

Which is why you should be back here with me, he says, tries to touch my hand.

I find this beautiful girl with Chinese eyes. Her hair is smooth, all of a piece, sliding around like something out of the ocean. Why men, I am thinking. We dance hips together, her soft thighs—the smell of lanolin, cinnamon, honey chapstick. Her shining two lips.

Then her man comes up and steals her away--and James comes from behind me--the men pulling us apart while we are still looking at each other, and now James wants to go. And why the fuck not--why not anything. Why not everything?

He's eating something and I take it out of his hands--anything you want, he tells me, I will give you anything you want.

There is nothing that I want, I tell him.

If somebody doesn't know what they want you can't trust them, he says. They could do anything.

We are back in the room and talking drunken all night. You know it's just as easy to love a rich man, he says.

Why did I come here? This is not what I want, I'm pretending, I'm proving something--what, that I don't hurt? That I can also kiss someone unimportant whom I do not love or know, that I'm fine without you? I cannot believe anything will ever be good again.

I fall asleep--wake up and he is loudly pretending to sleep. I hate him, the juvenile, the idiot, veils all fallen away and everything four o’clock naked. He pulls me back into bed, against him, his coarse forearms which I like, holds me & we close our eyes, he starts talking about all the things. A girl like me. What he'd like to do together. What it would be like to wake up and see my face, what it would be like to leave me and go to a meeting and then come back to me again, my face still there. With my eyes closed he could be anyone.

We could be anyone anywhere, eyes closed making promises without the intention of ever keeping. The game that we are two innocents, and not liars, that we are brave, rational, as happy as we pretend to be.

I want fire. I want to be burned alive, to be eaten alive, never to feel. I want a lover to grab me to hold me and hurt me, to split me open, make me feel, make me dead.

In the morning with our eyes open we get ready, walking around comfortable and indifferent. He orders green tea and juice, we read the paper, we walk outside together for him to show me the city, pleasure in talking about the history of things but something inside me dropping forever like a stone.

I am falling forever, there is nothing and no one to catch me and there never was.

We go to the top of another hotel for breakfast. Do you like the vista, he asks me.

Yes, I say. Paper bags and seagulls in the air, elevators sliding up and down outside the buildings, the red bridge unfolded, the prison entrenched upon the sea, the men in the street. A boy my age sitting behind us, tapping on his laptop, and I am ashamed.

What are you thinking, I ask him.

I'm thinking how I'd like to kiss you, he says. We finish breakfast and walking away he does: tilting my chin, feeling my ribs and my smallness the way that N. used to, finding me out. (memories of our smallness seven years ago in my first apartment, N.'s dear face saying I want you to have my babies, I never want you apart from me. Endlessness, I want to own you. I want you against me when we are old and the blood doesn't move anymore. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I believed. I ate his promises and hung them like a light between my ribs. They will extract the promises like the brains from a mummy--thread them out through my nose, place them delicate into a jar by my body for someday to find.)

I turn my face away--James kisses my neck. In the elevator my neck and my shoulders, his hands in my hair, and I push into him, wanting to be punished to be shamed. I deserve to feel this fucking way. This is what I wanted. This is what I wanted. I have done nothing wrong. These are not anything but kisses. I have responsibilities to no one. No one has responsibilities to me. We are all adults here.

He has a meeting. I'll meet you here at one for lunch, he says, and goes out. I print my boarding passes in the lobby, think about taking a cab and leaving without goodbye. Instead, because I'm there, I walk outside, I go to shops. The people pretend they do not see me and that I cannot see them. We are one million blind men.

And that was me crying in the streets of San Francisco, silent in the bright white sunshine of a white morning, white bricks and people relaxed in their jackets not seeing me. Seagulls and plastic bags, women selling plastic bangles, colored scarves. I am alive.

I am anesthetized I am lost I am alive. I am leaving just as I came in. My burning heart, my sacred body, this world my pyre, these words are smoke, there is nothing which exists.

Reading the Book of Serenity on the flight home, I fall asleep and dream in koans:

The teacher to his attendant: bring me me the rhinoceros fan.

The student, shamefaced: that fan is broken.

So the fan is broken. Bring me then the rhinoceros, says his teacher.

What can you say? There is nothing you can say.

The teacher draws a circle in the dirt. Inside the circle he writes with his finger: rhino

--so, friend, you are broken. Walk not forwards but backwards. Walk back to your original nature, to your natural self, to your face before you were born: the source of the fan.

N. hands me back my heart. He walks away and I am at the center of all things alone, the darkness alone, and this is where I came from, my love, my sweetest friend, the days before you pulled me out, and this is what I am made from: darkness and water and female softness. Yin lady, orange moon, temple's priestess.
I sing the song of myself.

scenes-(unfinished)

Can I just go to sleep here.
I don't think your parents would like that.
Why? You're like another dad.
Go upstairs with Samantha.
She gets up lingeringly, standing in front of the TV, playing with her hair. Smoothing it back from her face. Think I should cut it? she says.
No.
Her face tilted in the blue dark--You like it this way?
It's--I clear my throat--don't change anything.
I want something different, she says, thick-voiced, playing with the strap of her tank top. Rolling the fabric back and forth across her collar bone, the slope of her bright shoulder. Every day is the same, she says, and I want something different.
Kid, I'm trying to watch this.
Sure, she says. I hear her looking back at me, sound of her hair sliding on her shoulders; she'd like to sit where my wife sits. Upstairs the rattle and beep of my sons playing video games. The door slams.

Faye, my wife, had the bedroom done in white and blue. Lit by the night outside us the room becomes lunar: in the bed the planes of her strong shoulders, hard arms stretched fixed across the bed like pottery from the moon, cold perfect. Wax smell of her lipstick, rubbed off on both pillows, black in the dark--Faye all around me. I sit in the chair, taking off my shoes, the sound of her breathing and the fan I can't hear the kids anymore, the sound of the television I left on in expectation of morning anymore, the cars passing outside like space ships to other planets. My wife, my woman, I love her, she is everything I think about and need. I know this. The house, the kids. She works like a slave.
I know this but it comes to me that I am drowning in water, breathing cold water--
my wife, my wife, dreaming across the lids of her eyes: Charlie, she says. Charles. Come to bed.
Keeping her eyes closed to me she is a stranger. Her legs twisting heavily under the sheets to suck me inside her. Cold silk of arms around my neck--her cold neck, her hair in my hands--moving together keeping her eyes closed she is a stranger--strange the years together, strange the memories of classes in college, of apartments and dinners, all of it like a matinee movie and you are already walking out blinking into the sun, the images falling dim from your mind leaving only impressions, vague emotions--
The wetness of her, of Faye, of the cold hardness of my wife her face in my hands, I make her look at me through her closed eyes, fucking this woman whom I love. I imagine that she is the girl. She cries out. She squeezes me, kisses my neck. Faye.
I love you.
I love you.
In the bathroom we look away. You're up late, she says.
I didn't want the kids to sneak out.
I guess they still could.
Nothing happens this late.
She laughs, pats my ass on the way back to bed. Or don't you remember, she says.
We sleep far apart in the bed, something which has always bothered me but she says she has to spread out, else can't sleep--grew up sharing a bed with a sister, probably this has something to do with it.
The poor family Faye worked hard to rise up out of, dreaming every day of the day when she would care for and protect her own. Her family which would be perfect. Assembling us like parts--selecting a career, a house, me, pregnancies--calling to me that it is the perfect temperature for a daughter just right this second, sweetie!
She built us around her--built herself into the center, like the belly from the fairytale, which all the other little parts use or die.

Falling asleep as the sun rises, conscious of Faye dressing to run--a dream that I am at the bottom of the pool, staring at a neighbor. He's stands pregnant, staring down at me, holding his coffee.
I can see clearly into his belly. It is stuffed with twisted, staring animals, each of them still horribly covered in fur. They twine tighter and tighter inside him together, clenching like a snake.

Now the house is empty. Everyone gone. Someone turned off the TV. I evaluate myself in the black reflection. Re-tie my bathrobe--turn to the side. Not bad. Not a bad thirty-five. A thirty-five right in the middle. Not great. Not bad.
Am I the man she married?
I flip the TV back on.

There was a maid but it was ridiculous, with me there at home, lifting up my feet so she could vacuum. So I vacuum, I make the dinner. I get the boys from school. Some days Samantha does this--supposedly one of the chores she was going to do to pay off her car, but the truth is that I like doing it, like seeing all the little kids exploding outside like dandelion seeds, their little backpacks bouncing up and down, pushing each other shrieking. Adam likes this one little girl and she likes him back--sometimes they come out together at the same time and look back at each other while they run in different directions to their cars.
It's time to get the boys before long--another truth is that I stay up late so that I'm up just right as they need to be picked up, because honestly it's so quiet, here with the TV.
I will get a job when Adam is eight, I tell myself. Nine.
--Someplace loud. A kennel, a record store. Someplace roaring. A speedway.

But at the school there is Sam's little purple car after all. She and Esther are sitting outside, talking in the grass. Esther sees me, waves at me like I'm her age.
Hey! she says. She has this way of touching her mouth all the time. It's like being hit by lightning.
It's my day, ding-dong, Samantha says. Young for sixteen, my daughter doesn't hate me quite yet.
Guess I forgot.
The realization that I'm grinning helplessly back at Esther. She catches it--Mr. Canadas, she says sneakily, she who usually calls me Chaz--think you could do us a favor later?
Jesus, kid, it's a Monday.
She shrugs winningly. (Will probably be pregnant at seventeen.)
Please?
Sam rolls her eyes. You don't have to, dad.
No, it's fine. I picked up extra the other day--just stop by later. Before Faye, okay.
Of course.
So, you want to take them home, then? Samantha says. She has a stem of grass in her mouth.
I pull it out and cup it between my hands, making the perfect whistle. It cuts across clear and sweet, just as the kids come barreling out the doors. I blow till I'm red faced--kids start screaming, pulling up grass for their own whistles. Parents glare.
Wow, says Esther.
Lame, dad, says Sam. Hates me now a little bit.
Adam catapults into me. Brian wanders up with a finger in his mouth, looking preoccupied. The girls wave and drive away. I watch the silhouette of Esther's head go.
We want Popsicles, Brian says.
Oh yeah, me too, I say, nodding at the teacher standing duty. She smiles back instantly, a sunny, shining person, wearing invisible braces and a jacket with this pattern of cats all over it, pink and purple.
I could be a teacher...all the women teachers would love me. --Oh, he's so gentle with the kids, so good with his hands--
Oh, Chaz, this one would say, tittering out the door. Fun. Planting trees for the school and dancing at the talent show to make the kids laugh.
And Faye scoffing in the wings...

Esther and Samantha slouching on the patio chairs, trying to hide their cigarettes. I stomp outside. What are you thinking, I hiss. I jerk the butts out of their mouths. --She'll think I've been smoking.
Esther, all her blood rushed to her lips: What, and then she'll ground you? She laughs. Where's the bottle?
Fuck that, I say. Fuck you, assuming I have it for you.
Samantha goes inside. Esther sullen stands her ground--throws her shoulders back, suddenly big as life.
She says it back to me. Fuck you. Chaz. Assuming I have it for you.
She stands up slowly, holding herself up like a woman. Walks all the way around the table to me and puts her face up in mine. She sneers.
Kiss me, if you want to so bad, she says.
Get off my property.
Faye's property, she says. You're just furniture.
Soylent Green--it was on the week before, all of us watching it together, big bowl of popcorn with melty m&ms, and Esther in the white dress that hit just at her upper thighs--
Vicious, I say. Esther trips away unbothered, the cold little bitch. I watch her perfect ass retreat in its jean cutoffs.

When Samantha is in college, I reflect, she will bring home girls who have had time in the world to be broken. Girls who will be kind to me, her good old sexy old dad.

Faye comes home and wipes out on the sofa in the den. Go away, she groans. Turn off the lights. She presses her forehead into the pillow, something she does with a headache.
You want your medicine?
Go away.
So I slink upstairs to the lunar bedroom and try to relax, to look at some TV--it's impossible to fade out in here because the bedroom is really Faye's realm. Everything is Faye's realm, but particularly the bedroom.
She picked out each piece of furniture, circling them one by one in a magazine. We were flying to the Keys.
We'll get back and everything will already be there! she'd said. Do you like this lamp?
No, I said.
It'll grow on you, hon. I didn't like it at first either, but then... she squints and turns the magazine sideways. You see? When you're lying down it looks fantastic. That's key. In a bedroom.
Ice cubes in our glasses and conditioned air at 10,000 feet, my wife smiles at me with red lipstick around yellow teeth. Her eyes are dirty aquariums. They swim full of everything that is not me.
In a bedroom, I say, and touch my forehead to hers--grinning like the lovers we are, everyone in the cabin jealous of our love. Out of the corner of my eyes I see them--wives looking at husbands looking at wives out of the corner of their own eyes: why aren't we happy too? It could be so easy. Forgive, forget. Forget and forget.

That was two years ago. Maybe two and a half.

So watching TV alone in our bedroom while she lies downstairs refusing to take medicine, my phone rings. Someone crying.
Hello, hello?
Mr. Canadaaas?
Yes, yes, I'm here-
I think something baaad happened...I can't feel...Sam won't get up...
Where are you?
*Click*
Vertigo. My bed is the center of the world. The floor has fallen away.
Blood rushes to my head a black wall on all sides of my eyes: calling the number back, over and over, ringing and ringing and ringing.
My daughter answers, coughing. The sound of wind.
Baby--where are you?
She starts crying. We're outside, we're coming. He's back there and it's okay...it's okay...
I'm going to come and get you, but you have to tell me where you are. What's around you?
That...Nazarene church...
Okay-stay there. Don't move, just stand there. I'm coming right now.
She's so quiet, fading away, I'm practically yelling into the phone, yelling to penetrate her skull through the phone, willing her to stand still, a fawn in the forest, stand and wait and be all right. Skull of my little, little girl.
I can't see them at first and think that I'll go crazy--leaning on the horn, getting out of the car--Sam! Sam!
Then they're staggering out from the shadows, makeup bleeding down their faces, faces wenched up like little girls with bloody knees,
I gather them to me like little birds, kissing their hair--you're okay, you're going to be okay--
All of us in the car, and it occurs to me that they need to go to the hospital. I am not comfortable with hospitals. It is not a good idea for me to go to the hospital, or to any doctor, ever, or to any government institution, ever, and these are my girls and I can't very well drop them at the corner and speed away, now can I?
So we're driving home.

Think you should eat something, absorb some of whatever you had? I ask helpfully.
Esther makes a retching noise.
Maybe not, then.
We get back. They don't want to watch TV, they don't want to eat. They want to sit around and cry. So we sit down with our arms around each other and they do that.
He keeps saying, oh, that’s not my shot, that’s your shot, Esther says, and I think he’s being friendly, you know, being polite, and then I wake up in his bed and he’s on me passed out—my shorts are undone—and then Sam’s in the bathroom on the floor and she won’t wake up and she didn’t want to get up—
And he said he’d been on the McCormick yesterday, but it was full when we got there-
Where were his parents?
They’re out of town—
Your pants were on?
Yeah, Esther says.
It’s hard to pull off somebody’s shorts if they're not helping, I tell her. I can't believe this is a discussion we are having. I plow ahead--Ever do that? Play limp? —
Esther nods her head numbly.
and if he had gotten them off, he wouldn’t have got them back on. He passed out. So see, you're okay.
Yeah, she says. --I’m gonna get him so bad.
Yeah, Sam says, let's ruin his life.
Want me to go get his dick for you? I say.
They laugh. I wipe Sam's face for her.
I want to do it myself, she says.
Only not violently, Esther says. No violence.
I'm the first to get in the bed. They cuddle up to me like kittens. For a while we're all of us just lying there. Then Esther climbs on top of me.
I'm gonna rub your back, she says.
I should be rubbing yours.
No, this is my thank you for coming and getting us. And not ratting on us. For all the times not ratting on us.
Blood money. But my shirt is thin. I can feel the muscles in her bare thighs through the fabric.
Samantha lying next to us is still. I pretend I don't realize that I want her to fall asleep. We listen to her breathing. Esther leans forward and licks my neck. Samantha is sleeping.
Don't, I say. I roll over and Esther lies down against me for the most perfect, complete second of my adult life before my daughter stirs. She wakes with a start--we need to call the police, she says.
No, no police, I say. We really can't have any police, hon. I stare at my daughter with cold eyes. You know why, I say.
I'm tired of this, she says. Sits up.
Esther sitting on the other side of me, too erect, and they look at each other over the top of my head. Something happens until Samantha leaves silently, closing the door behind her.
Esther pushes me over again. She sticks her tongue in my mouth and tries to take my shirt off.
I thought you were sick, I say. Around me the walls are melting-
Don't talk, she says. Mr. Canadas.
Unbuttoning my pants and unbuttoning hers. Further. We're going further. I do nothing. Naked on top of me as light as a flower. Her hair falls down over the tops of her breasts, her nipples like nuts peeping through. Burning in my palms, under my lips, and I am on top of her. She closes her eyes, smiling, smiling, smiling--send me, she says.
Kissing her face, the down of her cheeks--
really send me, she says.

She turns away from me to put on her clothes. Leaves her bra on the floor but I pick it up and hand it to her--
She hesitates, starts to take the shirt off again and I turn away. There is a catch in her breath. I open the window. The sound of Esther's hair, moving against her warm skin, walking away from me.

Outside across the street a man mowing his lawn at night. One of those mowers with headlights on it. Going up and down, up and down, rigorously, like a toy. Somebody walking their dog. The smell of chlorine, cut grass, cookouts. Hot asphalt. The smell of sixteen year old virginity, of nothing has happened yet, of a whole life stretching blameless and open before you.

Beneath me I know my house is empty.